Tag Archives: list

Yesterday, I recommended books that I think everyone should read; here’s my list of books I should read. Many of these appear on AP reading lists, are bestselling books, or were recommended by friends much smarter and well-read than I. I have quite a few of these books on my shelves, but I’ve just never read them.

Fiction:

Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart

Richard Adams: Watership Down

Mitch Albom: The Five People You Meet In Heaven

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Laurie Anderson: Speak

Julian Barnes: A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters

Jorge Borges: Ficciones

Ray Bradbury: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Albert Camus: The Stranger

Truman Capote: In Cold Blood

Willa Cather: Death Comes for the Archbishop

Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote

Tom Clancy: The Hunt For Red October

James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans

Roald Dahl: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment

Theodore Dreiser: An American Tragedy

George Eliot: Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

William Faulkner: Absalom! Absalom!, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury

Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender Is The Night, Babylon Revisited

Margaret Mitchell: Gone With The Wind

Robert Graves: I, Claudius

Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Joseph Heller: Catch-22

Earnest Hemingway: A Farewell To Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day

Henry James: Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, The American

James Joyce: Dubliners

Ken Kesey: One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

Rudyard Kipling: Kim

Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers

Sinclair Lewis: Babbit

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love In The Time Of Cholera, One Hundred Years of Solitude

A little while ago I wrote a post about some book lists and noted which ones I had read, and then I asked which books you think everyone should read. I’ve also been working to put together a list of books I think everyone should read.

Now, the books I have listed below were chosen based on a variety of factors. Many of these books are personal favorites that I have read several times. All of these books have made some kind of impression on me and have affected my view of literature and the world. In some cases, the worldview is overtly anti-God or amoral/immoral, but the book helped me understand other cultures and how other people think. The point of this list was to recommend a variety of books from a variety of perspectives, not to give recommendations of “squeaky clean” literature (though some are pretty free of graphic, offensive elements, they may have philosophical issues I don’t agree with).

With the exception of the poets and preachers, whose works I have only sampled (their body of literature being so large it is hard to read their complete works), I have read all of the works listed, so please feel free to ask, if you’d like a more specific analysis of the book.

I’ve chosen a wide variety of books for this list. Some are modern popular fiction; some are ancient epic poems. Some are “classic” modern fiction, with many potentially offensive elements; some are books by Christian authors generally written for a Christian audience.

I’ve also had to reconcile myself to the fact that this list is not going to be perfect. I’ve pondered the choices for far too long and keep making changes. Okay. Disclaimer over. Here’s the list.

Fiction:

Louisa May Alcott: Little Women, Little Men

Laurie Anderson: Chains, Forge

Jane Austen: Emma, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice

Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451

Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre

John Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress

Orson Scott Card: Ender’s Game

Kate Chopin: The Awakening

Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone

Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe

Don DeLillo: White Noise

Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities

Tim Downs: The Bug Man series

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes stories

Alexander Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

E.M. Forster: A Room with a View, Passage to India, Howards End

Thomas Hardy: Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter

Khaled Hosseini: The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns

Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Misérables

Aldous Huxley: Brave New World

Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God

James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird

C.S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia, Space Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce

Jack London: The Call of the Wild, White Fang

Lois Lowry: The Giver

Daphne Du Maurier: Rebecca

Baroness Orczy: The Scarlet Pimpernel

George Orwell: 1984, Animal Farm

Alan Paton: Cry, the Beloved Country

J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter series

Salman Rushdie: Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Shalimar the Clown

Alexander McCall Smith: The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective series

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Cancer Ward

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings

Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Jules Verne: Around the World in Eighty Days

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Virginia Woolf: To The Lighthouse

Markus Zusak: The Book Thief

Drama:

AntonChekhov: The Cherry Orchard

Johann Goethe: Faust

William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest, Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado about Nothing

Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest, The Ideal Husband

Poetry:

Dante Alighieri: Inferno

Beowulf

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese

Robert Browning

Amy Carmichael: If

E.E. Cummings

Emily Dickinson

John Donne

T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land

Robert Frost

George Herbert: The Temple

Homer: Iliad, Odyssey

John Milton: Paradise Lost

William Shakespeare: Sonnets

Sophocles: Oedipus Rex

Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene

Walt Whitman

Non-Fiction:

Mitch Albom: Tuesdays with Morrie

James Bradley: Flyboys

Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt: Freakonomics

Anne Frank: The Diary of Anne Frank

Malcolm Gladwell: Blink, The Tipping Point

Ron Hall and Denver Moore: Same Kind of Different as Me

Marcus Luttrell: Lone Survivor

Greg Mortenson: Three Cups of Tea

Barack Obama: Dreams from My Father

Dave Ramsey: Total Money Makeover

Lynne Truss: Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own

Christian Living:

The ESV Study Bible

Valley of Vision

Jerry Bridges: Trusting God, The Pursuit of Holiness

Francis Chan: Crazy Love, Forgotten God

Henry Cloud & John Townsend: Boundaries

Mark Dever: What Does God Want of Us Anyway?

Kevin DeYoung: Just Do Something

Jonathan Edwards: sermons

Elisabeth Elliot: The Path of Loneliness, A Chance to Die: Biography of Amy Carmichael, Through Gates of Splendor, Shadow of the Almighty, Let Me be a Woman

A little while ago, Jon Acuff posted a 40 before 40 list on Stuff Christians Like; my friend Jenni told me about it and we both created lists of things we’d like to do before we turn 40. I just turned 30, so I have 10 years to accomplish the things on this list. Some of these things I know I’ll be able to do soon, but others will take a while (buy a house and write a book, for example).

I decided not to put goals about spiritual growth on this list because it is difficult to quantify and measure “know and love the Lord more every year” and sometimes God has different lessons for me to learn than I planned. Actually, I realize that all of these dreams and goals need to be held loosely, because God is in control of my life and His plans for me often differ from my plans for myself. I believe it is good to make plans and to dream of the things I could do for the Lord, the church, and others, but I also have to be submitted to God’s will and not view the things on this list as the markers of what makes life complete and satisfying. With that caveat, here’s my list!

Write a non-fiction book

Write a book of poetry

Write a hymn

Read through my list of “books I should read” (coming soon to a blog near you)

Get another master’s degree or a Ph.d.

Get out of debt and stay out of debt (with the exception of a mortgage—see below)

Buy my own place to live

Volunteer at a shelter for women and children or a rescue mission

Visit missionary friends and work in an orphanage in Africa

Support an orphan

Support a missionary

Become a mentor and/or foster parent

Learn how to play the guitar

Learn to speak a language fluently

Run a 1/2 marathon

Run a 5k in less than 28 minutes

Run a marathon

Visit the empty tomb, the Temple Mount, and see the Dead Sea Scrolls

Visit Petra and Amman, Jordan

Ride the Eurail across Europe (a 21 day pass is $900–anyone want to donate?)

Visit my friend Jodi when she’s a missionary in Spain

Visit Andorra (with Jodi) and Luxembourg

Climb one of the Swiss Alps

Visit the Sistine Chapel and ride a gondola in Venice

Visit England with a literary-minded friend and visit Stratford-Upon-Avon, the Globe Theater (and see a play), the Brontes’ home, Oxford, Cambridge, and a host of other sites

See the Mona Lisa at the Louvre

Drive on the autobahn

Walk on the Great Wall of China

Go on a safari in Africa

Run across the Golden Gate Bridge and run up a hill in San Francisco

Hike a 10,000+ foot mountain near Lake Tahoe (if I visit in the summer) or ski at a resort there (if I visit in the winter)

Take my mom to Colonial Williamsburg

Visit the Grand Canyon

Go on an Alaskan cruise

See a Broadway musical

See an opera at the Met (preferably one by Puccini)

See Placido Domingo perform live (I hope he doesn’t completely retire before I get a chance to hear him!)

See Evgeny Kissin perform live

Skate in Rockefeller Park at Christmas time

Learn how to use the manual settings on a nice camera (should do this before all the traveling)

What are some things you’d like to accomplish before hitting the next mile-marker age?

I recently read about starting your New Year’s resolutions early, so this morning I figured out a Bible reading and study plan, created a budget, and determined my exercise and reading goals. I have a couple other plans for this year that I need to think through some more, but I had already been thinking about these things during the month of December, so I thought, “Why not start early?”

I wouldn’t call the things I listed new resolutions, because I strive to be disciplined in these areas all the time, but I needed to refocus and make a plan for how I want to accomplish these things. Some of my goals for this year include reading the ESV in one year; making extra payments on my school bill, so I can finish paying it off before May; running a 1/2 marathon in February; and reading a book a week.

What are some of your New Year’s resolutions? Do you have any brand-spanking new resolutions, or are you like me and resolve to do the same things every year!

1. The Gospel–I’m thankful for salvation through Christ Jesus and that He continues to save me from my sins (I Cor. 15:1-3). I’m thankful for a renewed understanding of and appreciation for the Gospel.

2. God’s grace and mercy–Except for God’s grace, I would be lost in my sin (Eph. 2:8-9). Except for God’s grace, I would have no interest in spiritual things or have any growth in godliness at all.

4. God’s forgiveness–Because of Jesus Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection from the dead, I have been forgiven and justified before God (Romans 3:25-27).

Family

1. My parents–I am thankful my parents were saved before I was born. They raised me in a godly family, encouraged me to love and serve God, sacrificed for a Christian school education, and led by example.

2. My brothers, Nate, Ben, and Zeke–My brothers are all living for the Lord and serving Him in their respective vocations. I’m thankful Nate and Ben both married godly women who love them and edify them. I’m thankful for Zeke, who is working hard in school to become a Marine Corps officer and hopefully a pilot; his discipline and dedication are an inspiration to me. (He’s also a marathoner.)

3. My niece, McKenna–McKenna is such a special little girl and I’m so thankful that the Lord miraculously protected her during her birth and preserved her life. I can’t wait to meet her (hopefully this summer!).

Friends

1. The Filipiaks and Abels–Both of these families invited me to spend Thanksgiving with them, and I enjoyed the time of fellowship and relaxation with them.

2. Friends on Guam–Elizabeth, Karen, Leah, Julie and so many others challenge me to think biblically and are a constant source of encouragement to me.

3. Friends in distant places–Jenni, Dawn, Jodi, Joanna–Even if communication is sporadic or infrequent, these friends have kept in touch and encourage me from afar. Each one challenges me in specific ways and have been such a help and blessing to me.

4. My students–While not friends, my students don’t fit in any other category . . . I’m thankful for the many things I’ve learned from my students and I’m thankful for the privilege of teaching them. God has used my students to teach me many lessons.

Common graces

1. Books–I love to read almost any type of writing: fiction, poetry, Christian living, history, political science, economics, science. Books are so comforting and edifying.

2. Music–I love music of all kinds. I enjoy listening to the same song over and over, analyzing each line of harmony and accompaniment (weird, I know). I like analyzing the words and philosophy of a song. I’m thankful for the things I’ve learned about God and man through listening to music.

3. The internet–I’m thankful for this means of communicating God’s Truth, of interacting with friends, and even seeing family and friends who are tens of thousands of miles away.

4. Coffee and tea–There’s nothing like curling up with a good book and a warm beverage for a relaxing afternoon.

5. Sleep–I don’t get enough of this, but I’m thankful for what I do get!